To the objection, heard in the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, that PC was a cruel and unusual punishment, it had been successfully argued that since the whole future of manned space-travel was dependent on deep-sleeping astronauts who had volunteered for their five-year missions to Mars and Venus, PC could not therefore be regarded as cruel.
The argument that in a subjective respect death concerns only consciousness did not survive the evidence of those convicts who had been returned from coma and reported their comatose dreams, which was itself confirmed by observations of electrical neuron activity in the brains of nearly all comatose convicts.
But a cold shiver ran down Jake’s spine as she stared into the void and tried to imagine it. She knew that she was ambiguous in her own attitude to PC. There were obvious advantages from the point of view of society in general. But from the viewpoint of the individual she could think of life as being of value only as a necessary condition of consciousness.
What had Wittgenstein said about it?
Jake retrieved her increasingly dog-eared copy of the Tractatus from her desk drawer, turned to the last few pages and read.
‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.’
That seemed logical enough. And this propositional form could easily be adapted to show that being unconscious was without question an event in life, and that it was perfectly feasible, with so much of the average human life being spent asleep, that people did live to experience the unconscious state as well. Hadn’t Freud proved that consciousness was not a necessary condition of an interesting life?
Where then was meaning? Where in that impersonal black sky of frightful grandeur that was the universe was significance?
As Jake stared at her reflection, the depth of what lay beyond helped to bring herself into focus. A sense of other realities, of the trivialities of everyday life, of something different from the routine, all of these sensations gradually made themselves felt within her. To see yourself you had to look where you were not. To find meaning you had to have the will to turn away from yourself.
Was that why men like the one calling himself Wittgenstein killed? For a momentary flash of identity? For a few seconds of significance? To escape from a lifetime’s lack of meaning?
Earlier that same day, Jake had felt a brief hatred for him. But now she found she could feel real pity.
I suppose you would like me to say something to the effect that I killed my victims when I heard the voices and that I believe that the voices came from God.
Naturally I’ve read of how other killers (although I hardly like to put myself in the same class as them) have tried this one on, and managed to have themselves adjudged insane, thereby escaping the needle. And I dare say you’ve been expecting me to claim something along these lines.
But the fact of the matter is this: we have you and I drunk up the sea. We have taken a sponge and wiped away the horizon. We have unchained the earth from the sun. And we are moving away now — away from all suns. We are perpetually falling backward, sideward, forward, in all directions. There is no up or down left. We are straying as through an infinite nothing. Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not the night coming inexorably upon us? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?
All right, I’ll admit it. This is hardly an original thought. Not these days anyway. I can’t claim this as my own. But you take my point. I mean, the contention that I killed when I heard the voices and that the voices came from God just won’t do. I mean, it’s hardly the claim of a sophisticated killer, now is it? It is too melodramatic, too theatrical for words. I mean, where’s the imagination there, for God’s sake?
Now if you were to suggest something along the lines of how I killed when I heard the voice and that I believed the voice was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, then at least we’d be heading in the right direction. It sounds a bit more original. And what’s more, it’s considerably nearer to being true. Because each time I kill one of my brothers, I am, of course, killing God.
But just a minute, I hear you say: if someone kills God and God does not exist, then surely he’s killing nothing at all. It makes no sense to say ‘I am killing something’ when the something does not exist. I can imagine a god that is not there, in this forest, but not kill one that is not there. And ‘to imagine a god in this forest’ means to imagine a god is there. But to kill a god does not mean that... But if someone says ‘in order for me to be able to imagine God he must after all exist in some sense’, the answer is: no, he does not have to exist in any sense. Except one.
Where God does exist is in the mind of man. Ergo, one kills a man, one kills God.
I know these things as thoughts. But my thoughts are not my experiences. They are an echo and after-effect of my experiences: as, when a train goes past my window, my room trembles. I am sitting in the train, however, and sometimes, I am the train itself. Intellect and passion, thinking and feeling — really, they’re all the same thing.
How fast has brother followed brother, from sunshine to the sunless land.
On my next day off I drove round to the home of the next brother on my list. I’m beginning to sound like Adrian Messenger, I know. I don’t mean this to sound vengeful or vindictive as in some Jacobean tragedian’s play. No, it felt right, what I was doing, cold and pure like crystal, but true. A sense of logical purpose had infected my mind, which is where it started for all of us. All in the mind. The mind of man — my haunt and the main region of my song.
After the farce with Shakespeare I decided to leave the dramatists alone and, still trying to disobey my first inclination, which was to kill a philosopher, I chose a poet. Wordsworth — stupendous genius! Damned fool.
My preliminary surveillance had only just begun when I realised that I was not the only one watching over him. Parked outside Wordsworth’s house (I thought I’d break the pattern again) was a scruffy grey van. For a while I paid it no attention as there was nobody in the driving seat. Imagine my surprise when the rear doors opened and two men got out to stretch their legs and smoke a cigarette. They didn’t look much like policemen but then, these days, who does? And given that one of them was carrying a pair of binoculars I didn’t suppose they could be from the Gas Board. The other one clinched it when I saw him unzip his anorak to reveal the flak jacket and machine pistol he was wearing underneath.
But what I failed to understand was how they neglected to observe me. Did they imagine that I wouldn’t reconnoitre my target before going to work? Can they seriously have believed that I was just going to turn up on Wordsworth’s doorstep and shoot him? Maybe they didn’t much care whether Wordsworth was shot or not.
Perhaps, if I’d been there longer, they might have taken me into consideration as a possible suspect. As it was, I simply started up my van and drove slowly away, very much aware of how lucky I’d been. And of how I had underestimated the police. I would have to be more careful in future, I told myself. Especially since I was planning to use my satellite phone to contact Policewoman in the minutes leading up to my next brother’s execution. It would hardly have looked professional to have been arrested in the middle of a philosophical dialogue.